Summary
Fourteen experimental interconnected stories from 1968, subtitled "Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice," that in Barth's opinion are "best when read aloud or recorded on tape."
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Media Reviews
"Enormous vitality and virtuosity...taken together, as Barth urges they should be, these fictions interreact to produce a series of constantly changing and enticingly illusive forms. Barth's cunning is to turn daily life into mythology while turning mythology into domestic comedy... "
-- Time
"Brilliantly written... The funhouse image, of course, lets Barth operate in his natural habitat, seeking truth between laughs and grotesque smiles of irony...[now] he has produced a finely drawn, often funny and fascinating picture of, pardon the expression, the creative process."
-- Newsweek
"We are all very much richer for this man...Barth, almost alone among his fellows, will have none of bloodless abstractions. Among his many styles, what is most distinctive is his toughness, the quick march of his verbs, his reliance on muscular Anglo-Saxon locutions, his puns."
-- Washington Post
"The Thalian design of the book paradoxically, paradigmatically, and parodically reaffirms Barth's continuing commitment to the Western literary traditions, its history, conventions, and developing forms." -- Max F. Schulz
"For all his hankering to experiment, Mr. Barth does not change his style, one of the most plastic and delightful in American writing today....His real interest is in the reader and in the metaphysical plight of imagination engaging with imagination." -- Guy Davenport
-- New York Times Book Review
"Of the 14 short fictions in LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE, only three could be called 'stories' in the old-fashioned sense of character, point of view, and linear development...and, in the context of the highly experimental fictions surrounding them, these stories appear as dinosaurs in a mirror-lined museum." -- Alfred Appel
-- Nation
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Anchor Books
Published date: 1988
Size: 5.5 x 8.25 inches
Weight: 0.5 pounds
Pages: 203
Publisher's Notes
Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction. Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning.
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